LEONARD HEARS ALL.
Half wild with jealous wrath, and nearly heart-broken, for he had loved her well, Leonard Yorke rode like a madman back to Yorke Towers, back to his mother to break the shameful news.
He took a different road home from the one by which he had traveled to the town. This road lay through the dense forest which stretched out, dark and gloomy, in the rear of Yorke Towers.
As he rode on through the sweet-scented pine woods, his eyes fell upon a small object, a fragment of cloth, which hung upon a blackberry bush and fluttered in the breeze as he passed by.
It was a little thing, an insignificant thing; but, somehow, Leonard felt a strange impulse to stop and investigate.
Dismounting, he approached the bush and carefully examined the bit of cloth. He uttered an exclamation of surprise.
It was a fragment of the very dress that Violet had worn the night before—a bit of black lawn, soft and fine in texture. Surely there was no mistake. He carefully detached it from the bush and placed it in his pocket.
As he was about to turn away, his eyes chanced to fall upon some foot-prints plainly imbedded in the damp, moist earth at his feet—small, dainty foot-prints—and near by a larger impress, evidently the foot-prints of a man.
As Leonard paused to examine with eager anxiety those tell-tale signs, he saw something black lying on the ground at the foot of a tree. It looked like a small, black snake coiled up in the sunshine.
He stooped closely and gazed eagerly at the thing. Surely, he was on the right track; he had made no mistake. Violet had been at this place the night before. What he saw lying at the foot of the tree was a jet bracelet, one of the very pair which Violet had worn the previous night when she had so strangely and mysteriously disappeared from Yorke Towers. With a stifled groan he picked it up, and slipping it into his pocket, turned away.